1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relate to telecommunications systems and, in particular, to an improved voice recognition system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In speech recognition systems, developers can define a grammar that specifies words and phrases that are listened for by a speech recognizer. Speech recognizers that operate in accordance with the Speech Recognition Grammar Specification (SRGS) may provide an output in the form of a “tag,” i.e., a semantic interpretation of the input word or phrase. The tag is used to resolve different words and phrases to the same result.
For example, a grammar can be designed to recognize various ways a user might ask for “vanilla ice cream,” e.g., “I want vanilla ice cream,” or “Vanilla, please,” or “Give me some vanilla.” The semantic interpretation for all of these could simply be “vanilla,” and a tag could be used to encode that information for the processing application (typically a VXML browser), e.g., tag=“vanilla.” The processing application then performs one or more functions based on the tag.
The processing application is thus dependent on the tag and grammar. That is, the processing application itself must be individually programmed for each tag and grammar. As can be appreciated, this can result in additional complexity and development time.